Kapital AD Infrastructure Developer

Job description

JPMorgan Chase is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $1.1 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries. The firm is a leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers and businesses, financial transaction processing, asset and wealth management, and private equity. Under the JPMorgan, Chase and Bank One brands, the firm serves millions of consumers in the United States and many of the world's most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients.

Overview of Application:-

Kapital is the Pricing and Risk Management system used by Global Rates Markets and Global Emerging Markets. Kapital supports a wide range of products, from vanilla IR Swaps to complex Rates Exotics and Hybrids products. Kapital manages the full lifecycle of the trade, from trade booking (or processing of STP) to feeding Confirmations and Settlement systems. It is used to produce the risk (SOD, EOD and Intraday) used by the Trading desk to manage their position in addition to calculation of P&L actuals for the trading desk every day. Kapital is also responsible for feeding corporate systems (Market Risk, Regulatory, and Collateral).

Kapital is written in Smalltalk and integrates with an object database (GemStone) as its persistence mechanism. The application has continuous build and integration processes with a single global codebase combined with automated nightly regression tests. The customised IDE is integrated within the application and allows for full code management and debugging capabilities. The system is currently going through a major transformation in that it is developing solutions for AWS and unifying its instances globally into a more centralised multi-time zone installation. The system sits within a Linux OS across multiple servers across multiple data centres.

Overview of Team:-

Approximately 80 Kapital developers are located across New York, London, Glasgow, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. The team is split into AD infrastructure, financial development and test & release functions. The AD Infrastructure team is located in London, New York and Glasgow and is made up of 16 people

Overview of Role:-

This role is for a Kapital AD Infrastructure Developer to help support and enhance the application infrastructure. The candidate will be coding in Smalltalk and also help direct UNIX level infrastructure changes - hence an understanding of UNIX infrastructures is needed.
The role will be based in our Glasgow offices working alongside other Kapital developers. Candidates will be expected to have some knowledge of, and have worked, with frameworks, databases technologies, and distribution architectures. While actual Smalltalk experience would be a plus, any OO language experience, such as Java or Python, would suffice. GemStone database experience would also be a plus, but experience in other database architectures would suffice e.g. Oracle, Sybase, NoSQL etc. The candidate will be expected to interact with both Kapital financial developers and business users and will need good interpersonal and communication skills. Support activities will play in the role with the candidate working on any number of infrastructure issues during the work day. The candidate must demonstrate a particular commitment to learn complex distributed architectures, help building and supporting Software Development Life Cycle applied in global development context, be able to share knowledge unsolicited and be willing to become one of the focal points for other Kapital developers to look to for infrastructure guidance. The candidate must be able to work independently with minimal managerial oversight, in an environment where creativity and innovation is not facilitated and yet is expected.

Desired profile

The role is in a fast paced environment thus the candidate must be able to adapt quickly to evolving requirements and drive their tasks to completion whilst working in an agile development environment.

Skills Required:-

The candidate should have an understanding of an object oriented programming language (e.g. Smalltalk, Python, Java, C++, C#) and their underlying principles
·  Inheritance vs. Composition
·  Polymorphism
·  Data modelling – Kapital is using a proprietary modelling framework called Frame Semantics based on Marvin Minsky's Frames the candidate will be expected to understand and adopt
·  Code version control
·  Working knowledge of Linux
·  UNIX infrastructures- DNS, NIS
·  Understanding of performant coding and optimisations
·  Enthusiasm for increasing knowledge of complex distribution architectures and object databases is essential
·  Willingness to adopt an agile development process
·  Clear communication